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The sun streamed unimpeded through the kitchen window, warming Jake’s back as he ate a bowl of cereal. It was a pleasant feeling, but also strange. Usually the light couldn’t get in. His RV blocked the east-facing windows and—

Something clicked.

Jake dropped his spoon and ran outside.

Soon Carl came by in his uniform. He flipped his report book open and considered the empty gravel rectangle: 8 x 40 feet.

“So much for Fathers and Sons,” he said. Jake looked up at him and Carl motioned with his thumb.

Jake followed the gesture and saw that it indicated an unobstructed view all the way to the end of the road and out to the pasture. Not a single RV or hitch camper graced a single driveway.

An emergency elder’s quorum meeting was called that night. After a brief opening prayer, they discussed the facts. Every recreational vehicle in the ward was gone. No tire tracks leading to or from the missing campers could be found. The police were stumped.

The men compared the amounts each owed on his particular vehicle. Jake came in second.

Then Malcolm, still wearing his monogrammed shirt and tie, appeared in the classroom doorway. Everyone turned to look at him—the only man in the ward who didn’t camp. Malcolm walked around the room scrutinizing each face, trying to pry something out of it. Then he turned and stomped out.

“His painting from New York,” said the still-uniformed Carl. “The one with the pink dots.”

Jake tried to suppress a snicker but was unsuccessful. In a few seconds, the entire quorum had joined him.

The next morning was quiet. Lying in bed, Jake could hear the cows. A pleasant sound, but vaguely disorienting. Usually the television would—

Something clicked.

An emergency elder’s quorum meeting was called that night. Even Malcolm was there—tie askew—sitting in a folding chair just like the rest of them.

The facts: no signs of break-ins. Even TVs bolted to the wall were gone; their cords cut even with the floor.

There must be more than one thief, they decided. How else could the whole neighborhood get hit in a single night?

Carl was dispatched to check the Covered Wagon Motel for shady guests. Then the quorum mobilized a posse charged with patrolling the ward that night.

They separated into pairs and strode up and down the streets well into the wee hours of the morning. But all they heard were the chirping of frogs and the breath of the highway; all they saw were the shadows of deer and the halo of the Milky Way.

Jake fell into bed at 5 a.m., glad it was Saturday.

Then something clicked.

He got out of bed and padded out of the room. He grabbed a flashlight and searched through his kids’ bedrooms and then through the kitchen, living room, and garage.

Everything seemed to be in its place.

“All is well,” he said.

A fitting phrase.

He decided to text it to Carl.

He sat down on the side of his bed and felt around on the top of the nightstand. Brow furrowed, he knelt next to his bed and felt out the transformer plugged into the wall. He took the cord between index finger and thumb and pulled gently along its length. The cord ended with an empty USB head.

The emergency elder’s quorum meeting was grim. The enemy was as a thief in the night, invading with no warning, stealing their possessions with impunity. Who knew what would vanish next?

Jake stood up and cleared his throat. He said it was time to put the revealed word into action. Time to fulfill the measure of their creation; time to ensure the safety of home and family.

Then he looked meaningfully at Malcolm. Uinta Grocery and Sport was still open . . . if anyone needed to buy a particular something. And maybe some ammo.

After his wife slumped snoring against his shoulder, Jake edged out of bed and opened the closet. He reached to the top shelf and pulled down a metal box.

He fiddled with the combination and then opened the lid, hefting out a Glock 42. Its gravity assured him that tonight would be his first and last meeting with the enemy.

He paced through the house, rattling doorknobs and jiggling windows. So strange, he thought. All his things just slipping away.

Then something clicked.

He found a roll of duct tape in the laundry room cupboard. He pulled a strip free and pressed the end of it to the gun’s handle. Then he wrapped the tape around the back of his hand and onto the handle again, taping his fourth and fifth finger to the grip and leaving his thumb, middle, and index fingers free.

He wrapped the tape around a few more times until the weapon and his hand were inseparable.

It felt good.

Then he sat down on a kitchen chair and, despite his best intentions, nodded into a dream.

He woke with his face pressed to the floor, his right hand cold and pained. Jake tried to raise himself to his knees but jerked to a stop mid-way.

He looked down and blinked.

His hand was inside the kitchen floor, his arm sticking straight up out of the linoleum.

Then he felt the gun pulling away from him, down into the ground, with a steady, implacable movement. His wrist bones began to separate as he labored against the force.

At first he panicked, almost crying out. But then the panic ignited into a holy rage. He squeezed the trigger again and again, his arm jolting with the recoil, dealing round after round into the earth beneath him.

But the gun sank steadily. And Jake suddenly understood that he would lose.

“So, there’s nothing that can be done? Even if we marched all night?” Prince Omer stood with Captain Pagag in the field with Esrah. She had given them the news of King Shule as soon as she had dismounted from her curelom.

Captain Pagag shook his head. “We’re too far away. The army wouldn’t make it in time. The kingdom looks to you now.”

Omer crossed his arms to keep them from trembling. He wasn’t ready to rule yet, let alone win a civil war. “My father rescued my grandfather. I should be able to do the same.”

Pagag frowned. “Young prince, your father had years to gather an army. It is not your failing that Noah prefers to execute his captured king.”

Esrah cleared her throat. “Your highness, I am sorry to be the one to tell you King Shule’s fate. Is there anything else you require?” She swayed on her feet. Omer wasn’t sure which she’d want first, a bed or a meal after such a long flight. Her curelom had already curled up to sleep in the middle of the field, its leathery wing extended over its half-finished peccary carcass.

Omer pressed his lips together. Maybe there was still a way to save his father. “What time did you say that the king would be executed?”

“Dawn, your highness.”

“And how long was the flight from Moron?”

“About ten hours.”

“Your highness,” Captain Pagag cut in. “You cannot be thinking about retaking the city using only curelom riders. The archers would slaughter you.”

“Not retaking the city, just raiding the prison.” Omer started towards the supply tent. “Send the word. We leave in half an hour.”

#

The moon had set not long before they began the final approach to Moron. Omer’s legs ached from holding his perch just behind the giant wings of his curelom, Corai. His hands were numb from the cold as they soared among the clouds. Earlier, he had needed to fight to stay awake, but now that the starlight showed the outline of Moron’s pyramid temple, his heart pounded within his chest. Please, God, let my father rule for a few more years.

He took one of his three obsidian-tipped javelins in hand and held it up, signaling to the other ten riders to prepare for the assault. They formed a V behind him. He squinted to make out the familiar shapes below. The archers on the outskirts of the city hadn’t seen the cureloms as they’d passed overhead. Now, they were almost directly above the complex where he had been raised. According to Esrah, the usurper Noah slept in the largest building there, and his father was kept in the small stone prison next to it. A dozen men with spears stood guard in the courtyard, two guarding Noah, four guarding the prison, and the rest patrolling in pairs.

Omer patted Corai’s scaly neck. “All right, girl. Let’s go.” She folded in her wings and dove straight for the south end of the complex, where a pair of guards walked the other way. Omer pressed himself tight to Corai’s neck, squinting against the rush of wind. The guards stopped, looked side to side, and then up. They shouted something Omer lost in the wind. Corai flared her wings out as she latched on to them with her talons, like an eagle snatching prey.

The other guards rushed in as Omer’s companions swooped down on them. Half were felled instantly, while the others managed to get their spears into a defensive position. Omer urged Corai forward into the fray. She bared her fangs as the scent of blood filled the air. As the guard jabbed at her head, Omer threw his javelin. The guard fell with a groan.

With all the guards down, Omer swung off Corai’s back and ran for the prison door. Jared met him there, copper axe in hand. With a few chops, the wooden door was down. Omer ran in, javelins at the ready. A guard’s shadow moved at the side. Omer swung, parrying the guard’s spear with one javelin, while he thrust with the other. The guard fell with a thud.

Omer straightened, breathing hard. “Father?”

“Omer?” At the back, Omer could just make out a form with hands bound with leather cords. “How did you get here?”

“No time. We have to go.” He sliced the bonds with the head of the javelin and helped Father to his feet. Outside, warning horns called through the air. “Everyone up!” Omer shouted as they dashed outside. He helped Father onto Corai’s back.

“Shoot the king!” Noah had emerged from his house, not even taking the time to dress beyond wrapping a cloth around his waist.

“Go! Go!” Omer slapped Corai’s hindquarters and the curelom leapt into the air. Omer gripped his javelins hard as he ran for Noah. He didn’t look back as the archer next to Noah fired. Omer screamed and jumped, flinging the javelin with all his might. It struck Noah in the chest, and he collapsed to the ground. Omer switched the other javelin to his right hand, but the archer was already taking aim, straight at him.

Corai dove on top of the archer, biting his arm. With a fling of her head, she threw him against a wall. Father held out his hand to Omer. An arrow stuck out from his other shoulder. “Hop on.”

Omer took hold of Father’s hand and leapt astride. Corai took off into the air, her wings beating fast to get out of the archers’ range. Omer’s breathing didn’t come easy until they had made it beyond the edge of the city.

“Just had to outdo me, did you?” Father asked when they were able to land and to tend to his wound.

“Not possible.” Omer helped Father lay down.

“You’re too hard on yourself. You’ll make a good king.” Father smiled.

When they asked for a volunteer to drive the McCumber children on the Primary temple trip, Sister Miller didn’t notice hers was the only hand to go up. She hadn’t had a Primary calling or a Primary-aged child for years, but something had moved her, so she volunteered.

The Primary president sounded breathlessly surprised when she confirmed that yes, Sister Miller had actually volunteered and that this wasn’t a joke. “They don’t come to Church very often but they were there on Sunday,” she said, “and all five said they wanted to come. The youngest, Devon, is still in a booster seat but the rest, well. They won’t…um, they won’t be any trouble.” Her voice went strangely high on the word “any” and seemed to choke a little on the word “trouble.”

That Saturday morning Sister Miller woke up at 6:35 am, read her scriptures, showered and got dressed, and made sure to put on her best broach. Every trip to the temple was special.

She got in the car at 8:45 am and prayed that she would be able to drive safely and that the hearts of the McCumber children would be touched. With a whispered, “Amen,” she was off.

The McCumber children came spilling out the doorway before Sister Miller even put the car in park. She had thought there were only five of them but the way they were running around the yard made it hard to count.

The oldest—or at least the largest—a boy, sat in the front seat. “I’m only eleven,” he blurted out, “But I’m as big as a twelve year old so I can sit up here. My mom always says it’s okay.” Sister Miller thought she could smell Pepsi on his breath.

He scootched closer as a girl, almost his height but not quite, slid in next to him. “Ugh,” she said. “Matthew, you always think you get the front seat but you’re just barely eleven. I’ll be twelve next week.”

Sister Miller was going to ask about the booster seat when she glanced in her rearview mirror and saw four kids—no, three kids and a large neon yellow stuffed rabbit—squished in the back. The booster seat was in the middle and was occupied by the rabbit.

Matthew and the girl seated next to him saw it at the same time. They both turned around and started yelling. Their words were unintelligible to Sister Miller but they must have made sense because the younger ones (Sister Miller guessed they were eight, six, and maybe three years old—all boys) immediately scrambled and in minutes the smallest was in the booster seat with the stuffed rabbit belted onto his lap.

With a prayer in her heart, Sister Miller set off. Matthew and the girl fiddled with the radio, stopping on the loudest stations and arguing about every song. The younger ones whispered back and forth, occasionally poking each other. They had just reached the first stop light when a boy on one side of the booster seat asked a question, “Old lady? What’s a temple?”

Sister Miller decided to ignore the “old lady” and smiled beneficently. She knew this was one of those teaching moments that could plant a seed in a child’s heart. But before she could utter a word the boy on the other side answered, “God’s house. Duh. Where else do you think he’s gonna live? The Motel 6?”

All the kids laughed so loudly they couldn’t hear Sister Miller trying to answer. She began to think that maybe it was a good thing the ride only took about ten minutes. She could answer him when they got to the temple.

She turned left and was about to point out the spire on the temple rising just a few blocks away when another question came from behind, “Old lady? You ever been on a snipe hunt?” Without even pausing for an answer the child began to talk so fast Sister Miller could hardly catch a word, “Snipes-is-these-giant-black-birds-and-they-eat-kids-especially-the-ones-who-like-to-sleep-outside-so-you-should-never-sleep-outside-because-they-could-kill-you-faster-than-a-bear-or-a-mountain-lion-or-a-ninja-or-a-zombie-and-they’re-big-and-ugly-and-my-cousins-told-me-they-saw-one-once-when-they-were-in-Idaho-and-that-people-in-Idaho-give-their-babies-to-the-snipes-once-a-year-and-if-you-don’t-they-leave-you-in-the-forest-to-die-so-that’s-why-you-gotta-hunt-’em-but-only-at-night.”

This was punctuated by a screech of sacrilegious proportions uttered by the littlest one in the booster seat and probably instigated by the brother who hadn’t been talking but was now suspiciously gazing all-too-virtuously out the window. Sister Miller wasn’t sure how to calm the youngest since the neon yellow bunny almost completely hid him.

Just as his wailing, and Sister Miller’s racing mind, reached a fever pitch an acrid stench filled the car. All the children started gagging and pointing fingers.

“Michael! What did you eat for breakfast?” came from the front seat.

“It wasn’t me! The smeller’s the feller, Emmeline!” was the retort.

“I’m gonna barf,” came another voice from the back seat. “That smells like cow—!”

Sister Miller’s jaw dropped and through her burning ears she focused on the sound of her own voice singing, “Let us oft speak kind words to each other. . . .” Just as they pulled through the temple gates a chorus of voices called out, “I’m telling, Mom!!” and “Jeez, Andrew!” and “You said a potty word! You said a potty word!” and “Why you gonna tell Mom? She says that all the time!”

Sister Miller wasn’t sure who said what because she was quite distracted by the sound of the youngest who, no longer crying, was jubilantly singing his own song— a simple song made up of only one word. One incredibly inappropriate, Holy-Ghost-offending word.

She parked the car and all the kids tumbled out just as fast as they had climbed in, paying no heed to the temple landscaping—except for the preschooler who reached sticky hands out from behind the bunny.

As Sister Miller lifted him and the bunny out of the car, he leaned in close and whispered in her ear, “Thanks, Old Lady.” Then, pointing at the temple and nuzzling his rabbit into her neck he added, “Jesus loves you.”

I first realized there might be something wrong with my vision in sixth grade. My teacher, Mrs. Bullock, had switched up the seating chart, and I ended up on the back row next to a black-haired boy named Alan. Boys still had cooties in those days, but I had to breach the taboo when I noticed something odd. Mrs. Bullock was standing at the chalkboard, her wrist moving smoothly, producing her signature curlicue script, except…

“Is the chalk broken?” I hissed. Alan looked at me blankly. “The chalk!” I said. “There’s nothing coming out of it!” Alan continued to stare. Looking back, I’m not sure if he was afraid of my cooties or if he just thought I was stupid.

Finally, he said, “Uh, the chalk is fine.” He turned towards the front with an eye-roll. I followed suit, staring intently at the blank green board and wondering if I was the victim of an elaborate prank the rest of the class was somehow in on.

I waited for the teacher to sit at her desk before timidly making my way to the front of the room. Several rows up, thin white lines appeared on the board. A few steps further and the lines twisted themselves into legible script. I was unnerved. Moments later, an understanding Mrs. Bullock switched me to the front row.

I didn’t think much of the incident until a couple weeks later when it was time for school-wide vision screening. I was nervous as I stood in line waiting for my turn to read off the pyramid of letters. I took the proffered cardboard circle, held it over my right eye, toed the line and said, “E.”

“Good,” the man said. “How far down can you go?”

I hesitated, my eye trying to make sense of the fuzzy tangle of black shapes. “Well, the next line looks like P and… S?”

He frowned.

Next thing I knew, I was at the end of another line–the line for the kids who failed the screening. I felt ashamed and embarrassed as I watched the rest of my peers troop back to the classroom.

A few weeks later, my mom set up an eye appointment for me. I still remember trying on my glasses for the first time. I stood in the optometrist’s office and glanced out the window at an adjacent empty lot.

“There are clods of dirt and tiny little rocks all over the ground!” I exclaimed. “And individual leaves on the trees!” It was surreal–I’d had no idea what I was missing. There was a whole new layer of definition to the world that I’d been completely ignorant of.

#

There are times when I take off my glasses at night as my husband drives. Every light we pass is a swollen, twelve-pointed sphere with the symmetry of a snowflake. I’m surrounded by colorful globes springing from taillights, stoplights, and streetlights. I feel blind, but warmed.

I love sharp, crisp lines of black and white – to see things as they are. But sometimes, surrounded by starkness, I miss the seamlessness of blurred outlines and swirling shades of grey.

One of my favorite things each holiday season is to take out my contacts and sit in the dark in front of our lit Christmas tree. Each tiny colored bulb swells into a large, brilliant orb, the ethereal spheres hung like ornaments in the air. There is something transcendently beautiful about the softness of it.

God is in the details, they say, and I’ve seen the truth of that with both physical and spiritual eyes. But God is also in a blanket of muffling snow, in a muted grey sky, in the creamy bokeh behind a sharply focused image.

Becoming an adult, losing childhood naiveté, has been refreshing in some ways, like putting on a pair of glasses I didn’t know I needed. Still, though, I sometimes miss going through life in a rosy haze, seeing the world without its sharp angles or harsh contrasts, each pinprick of light something delicate, gauzy, beautiful.

After a very strong response to our call for submissions, we have narrowed the field to a longlist of twenty-four pieces. By the end of this week, we will narrow this list to a shortlist of twelve finalists, to be published June 16-June 28 on this blog.

The Mormon Lit Blitz is the world’s premier contest for Mormon Micro-Literature. Held annually, the contest has helped expose fickle online readers to engaging Mormon flash fiction, poetry, short essays, and so on for longer than most missions last. Submissions for The Third Annual Mormon Lit Blitz Writing Contest are due by 31 May 2014 to everydaymormonwriter@gmail.com. Submitted works may be in any genre so long as they are under 1,000 words and designed to resonate with an LDS audience in some way. Previously published material and simultaneous submissions are acceptable. Up to three submissions are allowed per entrant.

Finalists will be posted on the Mormon Artist magazine website starting 16 June. At the conclusion of the Lit Blitz, readers will vote for their favorite pieces and a $100 prize will be given to the winner.

To facilitate the judging process, we prefer to receive submissions as .doc, .docx, or .pdf attachments with the author’s name and contact information in the body of the email but not included in the attached text. Please feel free to email everydaymormonwriter@gmail.com with any questions.

I’m pleased to announce that after a two-year hiatus, Mormon Artist is back. To start us off, we have two excellent interviews with J. Kirk Richards and James Goldberg, and we have several more interviews and articles in the works. We’ll also be doing more special projects (more details to come).

For information about subscribing (via Facebook, Twitter, or RSS feeds), see the about page.

We’ve made a few changes to the magazine to streamline production:

The magazine is now web-only. No more PDF/print editions.

No issues or set publishing schedule. Instead, we’ll release interviews and articles individually.

Thanks first to our thirteen wonderful finalists–and for you readers, who contributed to the more than 10,000 views of their pieces. Tonight we are pleased to announce voters’ top five selections. They are

Congratulations! When we started the Lit Blitz, we knew there was an audience for LDS literary works, but we’ve been impressed and encouraged by how strong and supportive that audience has been. Since we were also impressed by the quality of submissions the contest received, we’ve decided to launch a new online literary venue called Everyday Mormon Writer. This week we’re featuring a poem by Lit Blitz Semi-Finalist Jake Balser and art by Nick Stephens. We will feature one work per week for the next few months as we build up a body of quality work until we are able to publish every weekday. Any works that were submitted to the Lit Blitz will be considered for publication on Everyday Mormon Writer. We also encourage you to submit other short works; details can be found on our Submissions page.